Convergent Realms

Prologue

All was quiet in the Steps at this time of night.

Hardly anyone was awake, and those who were didn't have much to do. The sun had gone down hours ago now, and the cool glow of the moon spread across the three tiers of the land. The faraway mountains echoed of miners tirelessly working to extract stone and many other minerals from the rock.

Below the mountains lay the lake, so calm and serene, full of wildlife still bustling. It was an understatement to call it a lake, really. It was more like a medium-sized ocean. It took up most of the second tier, so few lived there, but enough to call it home.

At the base of the steps lay the first tier, the grasslands. Infinitely flat and open, it was a lovely place to grow a city. However, it had its drawbacks, such as being surrounded entirely by the forest.

The forest was an area which few people dared go, lest they not come back, which was extraordinarily common. Still, the population controlled the only source of wood, so they had a major advantage.

Or so someone would think. After all, the second tier has the only source of water, and the third has the only source of solid building materials. Everyone was pretty important, and if one settlement stopped trading, there would be chaos.

But it was assured to many that this would never happen. It was a perfect system, and everyone wanted it to stay that way. There was no real reason to cease trading with another culture-after all, it would most likely end in most people's deaths. 

That was a matter most didn't consider in their ignorance. They simply slept along with the rest of the sentient beings in the world and were at peace with their lives in the waking hours.

The trees calmly whispered to each other in the wind, and the wind carried ideas and echoes through the caverns in the north. Those echoes in turn bounced around until they found the lake, where they sunk deeper and deeper, having run the full course of their lives in just a few minutes. 

The closest thing they had to a sea glistened in the moonlight, reflecting its beauty and power back onto the sky. It knew its importance, just as all other aspects of nature, including the sentients themselves.

The plains whispered merrily across the first tier, or Step, as some called them. The Steps were simply the sentient world; no one dared go into the forest if they weren't heavily suicidal or very, very stupid. The land had control of them, as nature always had intended, but it wouldn't necessarily last for long.

Those few people still conscious had a bad feeling about tonight, something they couldn't shake yet didn't want to believe. They shared it with no one else because it would've sounded silly, but interestingly enough, all of them had that very same feeling.

The existential dread slowed down their work, but they carried on through the night, crafting supplies from the simplest of materials. Their hearts began to ache for the olden days, something they were never there for, and their minds wandered to places that simply could not exist. 

It was official: everyone's mind had been poisoned with the same thought, Am I going to die? The answer to that question was no for most of them. Sure, some of them would die of exhaustion, and a couple of others of disease, but it was mostly an incident-free night.

Mostly

When the death count was tallied, it did not include the hundreds who would perish in the forest. Their ends came rather quickly, with a crash, some would even say. The cause of this was what looked to be a twinkling star signaling passersby to make a wish, but was actually a large spacecraft drifting across the expansive sky of the Steps.

The spacecraft itself came of course from a completely different form of existence, but that simply could not be determined by examination. Most would call it a kind of "magic" that had never been seen before, but almost no one truly believed that what they were seeing was conjured or cast.

It floated across the sky silently, moving downwards as it went to a part of the forest bordering the far side of the first Step. It looked graceful from up close as if it was an angel coming down from heaven and not an abomination from hell.  

Its wings (multiple gigantic engines) were silent, normally very loud when traveling, so almost none of the townsfolk awoke. When it crashed all that could be heard from the mountains was some trees snapping, but it was much louder near the grasslands. That was the part that woke people up.

Many feared a forest fire, which couldn't be ruled out as there had been fires from the crash, but it wasn't nearly as bad as anyone thought it would be. It was a graceful angel of hell faceplanting as they tried to make an entrance.

In other words, it was fucking beautiful.

The sentients feared what would come next, but nature took a different approach to the problem.

The lake still shimmered as it always would, giving off the moonlight and sharing it with those fortunate enough to be in its grasp at that moment in time. The fish still swam as they always did, scrounging for food in a tough ecosystem, and the plants still thrived. The cycle of life stayed in the lake.

In the mountains, the large winds got larger momentarily, then calmed down, as if nature was furious for a moment and then thought better of lashing out in front of all of its peers. Instead, the stone muttered silently, all collectively realizing that something had changed. 

The great plains still tumbled and whistled, simply unshaken by the sudden event. There was little to no change in the plains on that fateful night as if it really couldn't be bothered by something as simple as this.

And the forest, always so calm, yet ominous, began freaking the fuck out.